


See No Evil

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [14]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alt-Power, Altered Mental States, Empath powers? I guess?, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Implied/Referenced Torture, In a way, Mania, Taylor is a Vasil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 00:43:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20300647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: ( Taylor’s first impression of Brockton was that it was, for better or for worse, hopelessly quaint. Oh, that might have seemed like an insult to those who lived there and had to deal with the day-to-day bullshit that went on in it, but it made it no less true. The entire place reeked of emotions, of hopelessness tinged with anger like a cornered animal, a smell-taste-sensation that vibrated through her body, tasting of charcoal ash and an icy heat, smelling like the first frost and stagnant waters, the air thick with invisible knives that only her power let her feel, let her experience the blade’s edge smoothing over her skin. )Taylor Vasil is not a well-to-do girl, but then again, what child of Heartbreaker is?Certainly not the one with emotional psychometry powers, or the one who wonders if some guy named 'Dan' or something would be upset if she told him about her mother, really.





	See No Evil

Taylor’s first impression of Brockton was that it was, for better or for worse, hopelessly quaint. Oh, that might have seemed like an insult to those who lived there and had to deal with the day-to-day bullshit that went on in it, but it made it no less true. The entire place _reeked_ of emotions, of hopelessness tinged with anger like a cornered animal, a smell-taste-sensation that vibrated through her body, tasting of charcoal ash and an icy heat, smelling like the first frost and stagnant waters, the air thick with invisible knives that only her power let her feel, let her experience the blade’s edge smoothing over her skin.

A particular density of emotion drew her eye, hanging like a tangled web in the bend of a building. Her power reached out to it without her consent, sinking invisible fingers into it to feel out the nuance, the scent of fear - urine turning to sulfur - and hate - sticky tar, hardening into slate - and something a bit more foul, accompanied by flashes of a blonde woman being lunged at with a knife, the feeling of someone’s exhale ghosting on a neck too short for her real body. Taylor hummed beneath her breath, slid her gaze away from the shadowed alley, and directed it out across the street, reeling in her emotional psychometry before it could drag her places better left undisturbed.

It was a sight better than the compounds, than her father’s little villages full of women and disturbed children - herself included - but not by much. It was why she found it quaint, why it was endlessly curious. How could an entire city, an entire place, something just as populated as Sherbrooke or Gatineau, be so _thick_ with emotions, to the point where she could even see hints of them visually, see the way the corner of a building begins to blur or how a particular break in the road wavered murkily, as though it was held beneath boiling water.

How did her _mother_ come from this? How did the man she had been sweet on? Taylor’s mother had always been an academic woman, even when Father had started to strip her mind away, his ego unable to take someone being more intelligent than he was. She’d loved books, loved the little corners in the safehouses where she could tuck Taylor away in her lap and, even if they didn’t have the stories themselves, recite it all word-by-word, or even make them up as she went along. How did her mother, a woman who had been so successful in her career as an English professor that she was called over to Quebec to give a seminar, only to then be poached by Father, come from a place that felt just on the cusp of dying? Or maybe even a place that was already dead, but people hadn’t quite found the rot yet?

The mystery tickled the little part of Taylor that was broken, that was all slant-wise and pear-shaped. It beckoned a smile to her lips, beckoned the obsessive-compulsive-look-watch-observe-_taste_ feeling that she thought snuffed out after Father had decided he was tired of her mother and had broken her irrevocably before having her killed for sport.

It made her want to reach out with her powers, to make a person feel panic when they felt the steady beat in their chest, to _observe_ as that person fell into a feedback loop that meant either their brain or their body had to give before the other could rest. Taylor bit down on the impulse to smile, kept her mask carefully blank, the instinct easy to draw on after years of controlling what others saw her react to.

Fledgling streets, thick with the unwanted, gave way to the earliest signs of middle class decorum. Little cafes, bustling roads that bled off into suburbs. The whisper of wealth, surrounded by poverty, looked a bit like a knife buried in a dying man’s chest. It was so _obviously_ there, so gleaming and bright with reds and metals and the taste of defeat, yet it was also unavoidably _why_ the man was dying, to the point where it was hard to ignore, making it easy to never realize that the man was already gaunt and sallow-faced and would’ve likely died in a few months anyway.

It was beautiful. It was ugly and ruined and encompassed all the things she had been brought up to find enjoyable, to reach out to and make _worse_. Sometimes Taylor wondered if Father even realized it, realized that his actions weren’t breeding helpful sycophants insomuch as raising children to find the worst in society and _worsen_ it. Mind you, Taylor had read the gamut of conspiracy theories, both about her father and about the state of the world in general, but if there was ever one that she’d even slightly agreed with, could begin to acknowledge as, perhaps, on the right track, it was the one that said capes were, in effect, created to begin and sustain societal collapse.

Of course, she didn’t think it was so that ‘Big Bankers’ and reptilian overlords could take over in the aftermath, creating a slave caste of Humans, but still, there was an inkling of truth in the assessment, and the idea had well and truly stuck with Taylor since then.

Fishing her phone out of her pocket, Taylor spared the time a glance, clicking her tongue. She was running a bit late, sure, but they had to understand that she couldn’t just _not_, you know? Brockton was a gleaming, ruined, pus-filled wound on the planet, so _vibrantly_ there, so unavoidable, a bit like that knife, that she couldn’t help but marvel at it. It was beautiful and rotten and all the things a child of the most prolific rapist cape on the planet would enjoy, so surely they understood what it meant that they were putting her here, now that she was outside of her father’s control.

When the pretty cafes and little boutiques fell away, when the industrial part of the city came to replace it, Taylor was well and truly late. It was a difficult climb to get to the pre established meeting place, all gravel hills and half-abandoned factories, but she managed to the best of her ability.

Ducking out of sight to slip the simple white mask over her face, Taylor took a second to rein in her need to observe and prod the emotions she could feel, the lingering brush of them over the air and across the ground, before finally starting the last stretch of her meeting. She took steady steps, canting her gaze up as she saw the angled heads of large, lizard-dog beasts that were no doubt the result of Hellhound’s powers.

They - the Undersiders, she absently recalled - were trying to make an impact, then. Oh, she could suss out _quite_ a bit, just going by her meeting with Coil, in large part because the man, while having an excellent poker face, could very rarely actually control his emotions. They were _everywhere_, branded into the fabric of the carpet and leaking down the grains in the concrete walls, smelling so thickly of anger and hate and arousal and sadism that it was hard to really _think_ when she had to be in that office. She’d seen snapshots, most of which she’d wished she hadn’t, but she got the general impression that Tattletale wasn’t really fond of Coil, not that Taylor was either.

Being recruited by gunpoint and threats didn’t really endear oneself to a child-abducting megalomaniac, to be fair.

Finally cresting the hill, Taylor took in those who had come to meet her. There was, first and foremost, a man in biker leathers and a skull helmet, standing like some pompous vanguard at the front. He had his hands tucked behind his back, his posture comfortable in its intimidation, casually threatening in a way that took some honest-to-god practice. Just behind him was the dog-lizard woman, wearing a mix of castoff fur clothing, a leather jacket, and a bulldog mask. To the dog woman’s left was Tattletale, clad in purple and wearing a domino mask that was likely chosen to make the fake expressions she wore harder to ignore. Lastly, just a little behind the Thinker was a teenager in all renfaire clothing, his face covered by a venetian mask, his hair parted by a lazy crown, and his hand clutching a garish scepter.

Taylor, without preamble, reached out to all of them and _felt_. Tattletale’s biggest impression was of anxiety and paranoia, a heady mix that smelled like what rotten honey might. Hellhound was all anger, all simple things with little context or nuance, and had a surprisingly cornchip-like texture to it, which was one of the more bizarre sensations she’d gotten out of a person. Grue was stern, black leather and smoky, his emotions carefully repressed but the anger beneath it all? That was hard to ignore in her case, a bit like how a dog might be able to suss out that there were still fire-hot coals at the bottom of a pit, but a Human, with their simple eyes and simple nose, might not be able to.

Then, she switched to Regent, and _laughed_. It came from nowhere, really, the bubble of giggles that caught in her throat and belted out. Hellhound looked angry, felt angry, and so did Grue, but Regent? Oh, _oh_, he was an empty void, but an empty void with a texture, with one like subliant silk and old cobwebs. If she forced it, if she really pulled him open and reached inside, she could probably find some emotion, likely nothing much further than lust or greed, but only in small quantities, only in the prescribed amounts that come as a consequence of holding Father’s attention like Jean-Paul had.

Regent stiffened _ever-so-slightly_, and Taylor imagined he’d been off his game. She wanted to take her mask off, to revel in his confusion and slight anger, to curl her finger like a hook and dredge the foul little things out of his chest, to make him scream and rant and _feel_ like she always had when she needed to be his handler, to be the one who gave up everything to track the little fucker down when he felt the need to disobey Father.

“So _this_ was what Coil meant!” Taylor crowed, quietly hoping her slight jog wasn’t taken as an attack. “He’s a slimy man, isn’t he Jean-Paul?”

“It’s Alec,” was the dull, monotone response she got, Alec already pulling up his walls and receding into himself. She pushed her power out, dug it into his skin and then up his spine, made him feel what little anxiety his brain could still create whenever he had to take a breath. His posture caught immediately, twitching and shuddering as he surely felt the familiar brush of her Master effect, as the sole person in the household aside from Father himself who could still exert any _real_ level of control over the others.

Taylor’s leg was, unceremoniously, wrenched out from under her, sending her sprawling. She ducked her shoulder, rolled, and ignored the intense cramp that ran down her abdomen as Alec tried - and failed - to gain full control over her, his perfectly stiff posture faltering as he was forced to take in all the things she felt. They were opposites, them, two sides of the same fucked up coin, both extensions of Father’s Master power. Alec’s was cold, impersonal, he could feel what they felt, feel their emotions and responses, but he puppeted them more than anything else, stepped into their flesh and stayed there. Taylor? Her power was nothing _but_ emotions, nothing but sounds and tastes and sensations that other people found disturbing and overpowering, to the point where Father’s continued attempts to deaden her had produced very few results, if any.

Then, blackness encompassed her and she _hated_ it. It was hard to explain just what it was like, being smothered like that, being buried beneath the inky dark and it was all of a sudden that Taylor caught on that Coil might have intended this, might have ensured someone with such a disturbing power was near her at all times. She writhed for a moment, writhed as the air no longer sung and the gravel no longer bled, stumbling to her feet as a spell of vertigo overcame her, made her topple to the right and rush out of the cloud.

Abruptly and without warning, she was back. Sensations slammed into her skin, her nose and mouth and teeth and for a moment she wondered if _this_ was what others felt when they felt what she did, if this overwhelming _excess_ was well and truly the full-body _song_ that her power was most of the time. It took quite an effort to avoid retching into her palm, to hold everything back as the sheer _intensity_ of her power settled back into comfortable familiarity.

“Reverse the effect,” Grue’s voice was firm and unwavering, and so she did, knowing better than to play with chance given his ability. She yanked her power back, watched as Regent slumped back comfortably, his head snapping around to her and glaring. She glared back, tucking fingers beneath her mask and pushing it up above her hairline just to get the sheer expression across.

“You know,” Tattletale, this time. “I had _some_ ideas, but _Heartbreaker_? really?”

Alec shrugged, glancing away from Taylor and, as a consequence, giving her a win, petty thought it may be. “You don’t get to choose your parents.”

Tattletale hummed, combing a hand through her hair. “I suppose you don’t.”

Hellhound had, sometime during, left. The only sign of her having been there being the pair of dogs and the two piles of rapidly-shrinking flesh she’d left in her wake.

“How’d you escape, anyway?”

That question gave her pause. Taylor’s glare lessened, her mask - not the plastic one, but the one abuse had taught her - slid back over her face, and she spared Alec another glance. “Cherie ran off,” she said finally, pursing her lips. “I was sent to find her, didn’t, and then hopped the border before they could send Guillaume or Nicholas after me as well.”

“Why?”

Taylor paused, canted her head to one side. “You remember my mother, yeah?”

Alec shook his head. Typical.

“Well, either way, she used to tell me stories about some guy – Dan or something? I don’t know. She was sweet on him before Father, and I think in her own way it was how she coped with what had happened and was like, a little rebellion? Since she was _so_ out of Father’s interest mo—”  
  
“Taylor,” Alec’s voice was firm, if a touch awkward. “Get to the point.”

Taylor tried not to snicker, but failed. “Anyway, decided I’d try and see if he was still alive, suss shit out, maybe see how he’d respond to finding out what happened to her before I, I dunno, fucked off and went to do interesting things? I mean, it beats Cherie’s idea of joining the Nine.”

Alec let out a noise that was _close_ to a sigh, but restrained like it often was whenever Father had been in the house.

“Why’d you run?” Taylor shot back, finding the silence worse than an argument. Maybe she could needle him about it, even if they were going to be on the same team _surely_ Alec understood what it meant that they’d already lived together before, right? Surely he’d get what she was doing.

Surely he’d understand.

“I was bored and tired of doing what Dad wanted,” was Alec’s drawl, and a little part of Taylor she thought well and truly dead faltered.

Taylor hesitated. She hesitated for _too_ long and Alec’s lips turned up into a smirk-slash-sneer because he _knew_ that it wasn’t satisfactory, knew that it bothered her that he continued to be entirely incomprehensible to her, much like the rest of the kids were, much like Cherie and even Candy, poor, sweet seven year old Candy, that she’d abandoned because _nobody there understood_, because she was a sadistic empath in a world full of apathetic sociopaths and she could live with the former but could so rarely could cope with the latter.

Alec turned and walked away, lazy and belabored and making noises of complaint that he had to _do_ things, that he had to feel his muscles move and – and.

Taylor breathed out, unclenched her fists, noticing the crescent moons she’d cut into her skin with fingernails alone. All that was left was Tattletale and Grue, the former staring at her appraisingly and the latter - at least _feeling_, because she sure as shit couldn’t tell his expression what with the edgy godawful mask of his - looking as though he was rather done with her eccentricities.

“So,” Tattletale took the role of speaker, strutting forward in a way that might work if she wasn’t absolutely _reeking_ with paranoia and a hint of obsessive compulsion, the taste of plastic lingering in the back of her throat. “Welcome to the Undersiders. We’ll have to suss out a costume, for sure, but let’s at least begin with names. I’m Tattletale, and this”—she motioned towards Grue—”is Grue.” The condescension in her voice made it palpably clear she already knew that Taylor knew their cape names, if not their civilian ones. The bitch.

Taking in a breath and running through the list of names she’d used in Canada, Taylor gave it a short thought and, with all the impatience that her half-sibling had infected her with, came to a decision. “Kaleidoscope,” she said, making sure to at least _sound_ confident, though it was pretty obvious that Tattletale knew otherwise. “Will that work?”

Grue, apparently put off by her willingness to debate names - she never really got that, a name is a name is a name, she sure wasn’t attached to it, not even her birth name - just gave an awkward, stiff nod before walking back towards the warehouse behind them, trailing after the other two.

“He approves,” Tattletale said after a moment, mostly to herself.

Taylor snorted. “He’ll have to, I don’t think Coil will take me back now that I’ve lost my shock value.”

Tattletale sent her a shrewd glance before beckoning her on, off towards the building. Taylor, unable to really deny her, followed shortly after.


End file.
